search engines don’t appreciate it<\/a> and will treat the instance as a soft 404 anyway.<\/p>\nDon’t Use a Meta Refresh Tag Redirect<\/h3>\n I’ve seen some websites use a meta refresh tag to send users somewhere else after being on an error message page for a few seconds. Don’t do this. Navigating a user off of a page without their consent is usually a bad practice.<\/p>\n
Step 4: Track 404 Sessions in Google Analytics<\/h2>\n Paradoxically, we don’t want users landing on our 404 error pages, but we want to monitor that traffic when they do. We want to know how well our error page succeeds in recovering the user’s session and guides them toward content.<\/p>\n
We also want to know which URLs are broken so we can fix something that changed with our website or redirect the 404 URL to something relevant. Luckily, if we followed best practices, it’s easy to see how our lost users are doing in Google Analytics.<\/p>\n
See Which URLs Return 404<\/h3>\n Create a segment to only show pages that use the title tag of your custom 404 page:<\/p>\n
<\/noscript> <\/p>\nThen go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages to see the pageview report of the 404 error pages:<\/p>\n
<\/noscript> <\/p>\nHere we see users are still navigating to some posts we removed in a content cleanup project. We’ll need to create redirects for these to solve the problem, but how is our 404 page performing after people see it?<\/p>\n
To answer that question we’ll need to take a look at the navigation summary report for one of these pages:<\/p>\n
<\/noscript> <\/p>\nOnly 44% of users are exiting the site after seeing this page. Not bad, but not ideal.<\/p>\n
See Which Pages are Sending Traffic<\/h3>\n If we want to see which other domains are sending users to our 404 pages, we can add Full Referrer as a secondary dimension to the pageview report:<\/p>\n
<\/noscript> <\/p>\nBroken backlink reports should give us most of these pages over time, but the backlink reporting services are limited to how quickly they can crawl the web. If we have a time-sensitive need to know which other pages are sending users who are at risk of exiting our site, this report gives us that.<\/p>\n
Link Rot is Real and That’s Okay<\/h2>\n The web is not static. Pages are constantly being created and deleted, and the links between those pages are breaking and disappearing every day. This phenomenon is called “Link Rot<\/a>,” and it’s naturally occurring.<\/p>\nOur links are going to break over time. As SEOs, web managers, and good citizens of the web, we should be making sure users are able to navigate through link rot smoothly. And the first line of defense is a custom 404 page.<\/p><\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Updated 7\/16\/20 to include new information. You’ve spent a lot of time making sure your website is user-friendly, has a descriptive navigation, is organized in a way that makes sense, but what if someone makes a typo when typing in a URL? What if another website links to a page you don’t have any longer? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":53596,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
How to Create a Great Custom 404 Error Page - Portent<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n \n \n \n \n\t \n\t \n\t \n","yoast_head_json":{"title":"How to Create a Great Custom 404 Error Page - Portent","description":"404 pages can be annoying. Keep users on your website after something goes wrong with a custom 404 error page that is actually helpful and fun.","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.eigene-homepage-erstellen.net\/blog\/seo\/create-a-great-404-page.htm","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"How to Create a Great Custom 404 Error Page - Portent","og_description":"404 pages can be annoying. 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